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In a world that moves at the speed of light, a workplace or business that takes light years to locate a piece of paper crucial to an ongoing process is bound to lose out. Is it humanely possible to ensure such quick and error-free processes all the time? Maybe not, but nobody said humans have to pull this off.

Why ECM Came About?

Since the advent of technology, humans have had the knack for building solutions and products that do what humans themselves cannot. So, when we figured out that the whole process of collecting, storing for the long-run and watching over documents, is all way too tedious for us humans to handle, we had to find a technological counterpart to do this for us. It is this need that gave birth to ECM a.k.a Enterprise Content Management.

Road Blocks Freed Up By ECM

Professionals spend a lot of time looking for information that is crucial to processes. By storing information according to metadata, ECM allows searches using keywords, thereby saving time. ECM does not simply save this information, but also makes it available on several devices when businesses need to access it.

Another major issue that comes up with documents in the form of paper is the constant fear of them getting misplaced. When it comes to business processes, the loss of documents automatically means the whole process needs to be performed again, thus incurring massive losses for the business. Picture this — a customer opens an account with a bank and registers all his documents as part of the KYC process, and the whole folder is misplaced. The bank loses a customer almost immediately the second he/she figures they’d have to go through the tedious registration process all over again. When done online via ECM’s image capturing technology, documents are sent into a central repository, thereby drastically reducing chances of them being misplaced.

From Compliance to Digitization, ECM Has You Covered

With businesses and the world getting highly digitized everything from opening a bank account to transactions and bill payments happen via the Internet. Be it booking a cab or shopping online on one of the many portals, storing card details are a common feature. No matter how ardent a traveller or how enthusiastic about shopping one may be, having to fill in details related to the payment method every single time can be a classic turn-off for any customer. Let alone shopping, most people nowadays would flee at the idea of paperwork even for something as crucial as health insurance.

Equipped with content and process management capabilities, ECM keeps track of the documents and ensures businesses remain compliant with regulations. By ensuring employees follow defined processes and work in accordance with them, ECM makes collaboration easier. ECM ensures regulatory statutes are adhered to and ensures the correct information is captured and delivered.

ECM is not just systematic but also customizable in terms of information it stores and archives. ECM adapts to your needs and changes in them, thus making it the near perfect fit for most modern-day transactions. So, when business grows and there is a surge in the number of customers, clients, as well as employees, one can scale up their existing ECM system and rest assured, it will fit in. By allowing businesses to capture, manage, store, share, and deliver larger amounts of information in a more efficient and consistent manner, ECM makes growth in business very smooth.

Making Business Smoother and Environment-friendly

Apart from all the practical and business expansion uses ECM can be put to, it also serves a massive environmental purpose. We all know the connection between tree-felling and paper making. So, by saving paper and performing almost every function a paper document would do, ECMs can in fact save forests and give us a better environment.A truly digital ECM system would make content, in any pre-preferred format from images to videos, and across any mix of channels, available when needed. Employees are a key factor when it comes to business growth, and digital content which is available across platforms is essential to employee performance. An ECM does exactly this. Systems used by employees from different departments must be able to collaborate smoothly to ensure information flows seamlessly, and data updates are concurrent. Business applications work best when interconnected and expanded with the help of content services.With so much content and information in hand, comes great responsibility. In the world of business, responsibility translates to compliance. What's taken care of by a regulatory compliance officer can be made a lot more error-free and a lot less labour-intensive with content services.

From making information available on devices when needed, to saving trees and ensuring businesses remain compliant, ECM is crucial to business growth. It doesn't just help your business grow, but also grows with your business.

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